Here Comes the Sunfish

“I can tell you about ocean sunfishes, because I happen to be studying  their teeth and feeding system,” Willy Bemis told me over the phone. Willy is the former executive director of the Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island. I reached him in Ithaca where he is a professor and Faculty Curator of Ichthyology at Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. In other words, willy knows fish, especially sharks, lungfishes, coelacanths, bowfins, sturgeons and paddlefishes.

“They’re very unusual,” Willy explained of the ocean sunfish, and the heaviest of the bony fishes. They’re extremely prolific, quite common, and make millions of eggs. Their larvae are quite gorgeous. They look like spiked Christmas ornaments and are about the size of a pea.”

Like I said, Willy knows fish. More accurately, he loves fish. He once dissected an ocean sunfish (genus “Mola” from the Latin “millstone) at the Shoals Marine Lab. It was a small one, he says, barely six feet. The skin is like a plastic shell an inch and a half thick. Their anatomy, like their appearance, is downright strange. The have teeth and a parrot-like mouth. They feet mostly on jellyfish. They are pretty much inedible to humans and have few underwater predators.

Despite the lack of a tail, these weird creatures move gracefully through the water. using their fins like a rowing scull. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to work, since there are fossil mola dating back 50 million years. They get their sunfish name from a habit of lying on their sides at the surface basking their huge bodies in the sun, perhaps to remove all sorts of parasites. They’re not dangerous, they’re all over the planet, and you can see tons of them in videos on YouTube.

They do wash up on beaches now and then. That’s probably what happened to the poor little guy in the photo. “They are fascinatingly disgusting,” Willy says with obvious delight, “and among the most extreme fishes out there in so many aspects of their biology.” And Willy knows fish.  

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson